360 Overdose Deaths in Hawaiʻi: Meth and Fentanyl Surge While Hemp With Zero Fatalities Faces Crackdown
Hawaiʻi overdose deaths hit 360 while meth and fentanyl surge—so why is enforcement focused on hemp with zero fatalities?
360.
Not degrees. Deaths. That’s right, 360 deaths. That is how many people died of drug overdoses in Hawai’i in 2024.
Three hundred and sixty people on these islands in a single year — a 43% increase since 2021. Methamphetamine killed 275 of them. A 50% single-year surge. Eleven people under 21 died of drug overdoses in 2023, most of them killed not by meth but by counterfeit prescription pills pressed with fentanyl — fake Xanax, fake Adderall, fake Percocet — that look identical to legitimate medication and can be lethal in a single dose.
Cannabis and hemp? Zero. Z. E. R. O. The number has never moved.
The Crisis That Doesn’t Fit the Narrative
When state officials invoke public health as justification for their enforcement priorities, those words carry an implicit promise — that the machinery of government is aimed at actual threats, in proportion to actual harm. That the resources follow the bodies.
In Hawai’i in 2024, the bodies were with methamphetamine. Two hundred and seventy-five of them. A 50% single-year surge that should have triggered emergency sessions, crisis funding, and full mobilization of every public health dollar in this state.
Instead, Kenneth Fink’s Department of Health advanced regulations targeting hemp retailers. Anne Lopez’s office pursued enforcement actions against businesses selling a product with a death count of zero. The legislature found urgency to close the hemp loophole while the meth loophole — the one that swallowed 275 people last year — remains wide open.
This is not a resource allocation question. It is a values question. And the values on display are not the ones these officials campaign on!
The Children They Should Actually Be Protecting
Every parent in this state should understand what is actually threatening their child. It is not a hemp kiosk. It is a counterfeit pill that looks exactly like a legitimate prescription, costs less than a movie ticket, and can stop a heart before anyone reaches a phone. That is the emergency. That is where the press conferences should be.
The fact that they aren’t tells you everything about what is actually driving enforcement priorities in this state!
What Zero Means
Zero does not mean hemp is without risk or that no regulation is warranted. But it does unequivocally mean that in the entire documented history of cannabis and hemp in the United States, no coroner has ever listed either as a cause of death. Not once. Meanwhile Hawai’i’s drug-related emergency department visits increased 36% between 2021 and 2023. Pediatric and adolescent admissions rose sharply, driven almost entirely by synthetic opioid exposure. NOT ONE of those cases involved hemp!
Real child protection looks like aggressive interdiction of the fentanyl supply chain pressing counterfeit pills into teenage social networks. It looks like treatment infrastructure that can absorb a 36% surge without turning people away. It looks like a Department of Health that wakes up every morning with meth and fentanyl at the top of its list and doesn’t move on until those numbers stop climbing.
That is the conversation I will have with any official in this state willing to have it honestly, with the actual mortality data on the table.
Zero is still zero. Three hundred and sixty is not.
The difference between those two numbers is where the priorities of this state should live.
Right now, they don’t!
Lance Alyas
Oahu Dispensary and Provisions